Black Academics Say Race Exists! By Brian Simpson

While the sociology crowd think that they have deconstructed, and/or socially constructed race, a recent paper in the high impact factor journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, takes a slightly different position, which is worth noting: A. Oni-Orisan (et al.), “Embracing Genetic diversity to Improve Black Health,”

Here is the relevant bit:

“Ultimately, considering these and numerous other examples, we understand that genetic differences exist between people belonging to different socially constructed racial categories. We embrace this diversity and acknowledge its clinically meaningful implications. These differences can allow researchers to make important advances in health and science, and this recognition is what compels us to do the work we do.

We do not believe that ignoring race will reduce health disparities; such an approach is a form of naive “color blindness” that is more likely to perpetuate and potentially exacerbate disparities. Although ignoring race could improve equality (by leading to identical medical treatment for everyone), we believe that equity is necessary to address disparities. We urge our colleagues in medicine and science to refrain from haphazardly removing race from clinical algorithms and treatment guidelines in response to recent initiatives attempting to combat anti-Black racism. The ultimate goal, we believe, would be to replace race with genetic ancestry in an evidence-based manner. But we have not yet reached a point where genetic-ancestry data are readily available in routine care or where clinicians know what to do with these data. Until we do, ignoring race and thereby reverting to the United States’ outdated system of health care, in which clinical research findings are generated in populations of European descent and extrapolated to the treatment of non-European populations, is neither equitable nor safe for those other populations.

To reach a stage where genetic ancestry can replace race, we need more research in underrepresented populations. We envision a future with more racial diversity among participants in clinical trials and population genetics studies. Since the dearth of racial diversity in the scientific community has helped to fuel distrust in clinical trials on the part of minority patients, we also envision a future with greater diversity among biomedical researchers and health care professionals.

How we train our students will dictate the diversity of the next generation of genetic scientists and clinicians. Instilling a fundamental understanding of genetics early in training is a first step toward attracting talented people to the field, and indeed students in the health professions have themselves advocated for being taught genetics.

Recently, professional and graduate schools around the country have begun to incorporate antiracism training into their curricula. These initiatives may well reduce implicit bias in the classroom and at patients’ bedside, yet some of the materials used in these curricula promote ideologies that downplay the medical achievements of genetic studies. Such a slant could dissuade Black students from choosing genetic research as a career path. We believe that social scientists and geneticists should work together to design curricula that are antiracist but not antigenetics. Genetics research, if done responsibly, is antiracist.

As Covid-19 continues to ravage the world, we now have a better understanding of the clinical factors that predict poor outcomes in infected persons. Yet some apparently high-risk patients have favorable outcomes after infection, while some low-risk patients have more severe illness. This observation suggests that the severity of disease may have a partially genetic basis. Genomewide association studies have uncovered and validated genetic determinants of high Covid-19 severity; these studies, however, did not include African populations. Ongoing efforts are global but include a low proportion of African participants, and these few participants do not adequately reflect the genetic diversity of Africa. Unsurprisingly, the identified loci are rare in the genomes of African people.

Since the authors of the study are all Blacks, but “diverse,” the woke white brigade will most likely ignore the paper, rather than going in with all sociology vegans blazing. That would be … racist!